REMEMBERING

What It's All About

Don't let nostalgia cause short term memory loss

•

Protecting
the
United States of America
from
ever
having
to
walk
anywhere.

HERO

I guess this speech will knock anyone off the fence they ride hoping to rationalize remaining a convenient inhabitant of the invisible prison I speak of so often. I hereby commend to you another unique example of what I call heroes.

Hat Tip once again to Pisces Iscariot at Far Queue

PACHAMAMA

The other day a friend showed me a source of my frustration with the lack of response to my rants about civilization's rape of the planet and the complicity by indifference of consumers fueling such deadly aggression.

"I give you a ride to town and have to listen to your hatred of cars."

Snap. I all too rarely spotlight heroes on the positive side of ending the corporate globalization of capitalism and its commodification of everything. Well this morning Amy Goodman, my clearest information about current events, is in Tiquipaya for the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth hosted by Evo Morales, the original leader of the indigenous population's oust of Bechtel's claim on the water of Bolivia and now its President, who said in yesterday's opening ceremony,

We are here because in Copenhagen the so-called developed countries failed in their obligation to provide substantial commitments to reduce greenhouse gases. We have two paths: either Pachamama or death. We have two paths: either capitalism dies or Mother Earth dies. Either capitalism lives or Mother Earth lives. Of course, brothers and sisters, we are here for life, for humanity and for the rights of Mother Earth. Long live the rights of Mother Earth! Death to capitalism!

The clip I have embedded is an interview with an attendee who articulates the spirit of the gathering and speaks of an entirely new form of culture whose respect for Pachamama (a Quechua word, not derived from any colonial language or myth), Gaia, Mother Earth is restored to the fore as it has been preserved by the indigenous peoples despite colonization by western civilization. I intuit this gathering may well be that ground swell of good examples required to effect a true paradigm shift for the very reason that it comes from nature, the nature of people, and not the lifeless priorities of corporate states juggling the bottom line. Maybe.

ODE TO MORDICAI JONES

“Taught me erythin’ I know ‘bout gettin’ rich.”

When Eflim waxed nostalgic about the role model he took from George C. Scott’s character in a movie about the sporting life to be had on the fringes of society, his eyes glazed over as they gazed off at the castles in the sky he’d learned to construct for his marks.

He’d always considered himself a mere humble practitioner of the snake oil arts, like any number of salesmen, lawyers and politicians, until he watched a breakthrough television dramatization of a character he took to be his new role model, a serial killer who restricted his victims to serial killers by circumventing any restrictions on their legal pursuit, capture, trial and execution by the police force for which his overt occupation is a blood spatter analyst. Imagine that.

He changed his name from Tolliver Dolittle to Eflim Flame, charged a new suit to the credit card of someone who’d never notice anything larger than $10K on her statements and began making a priority list of the most destructive liars on the planet upon whom to wreak his dastardly deeds. His research quickly uncovered the prior existence of an organization of people with the same idea who had already begun perverting carefully orchestrated public relation lies to publicize the truth intended to be hidden. They call themselves the Yesmen. He joined them.

Ridicule can shake mountains built by confidence men. Like earthquake victims learn, it is not the quake that kills it is the castles one builds in the sky that crumble when faith in liars is shaken. Without liars, would faith ever be a requirement for anything?

These days Eflim is retired from dealing with anything that can be lied about. What lies can you tell a chicken to get more eggs or a garden to get juicier tomatoes or a friend to gain more love for who you actually are?

•

This thinly veiled fiction employed the literary style I found used extensively by Stephen King, which is to reference previous dramatizations rather than indulge in the descriptive creativity of one’s own, which I find for the purposes of blogging suits the goal of keeping it short. At the same time I realize I have lost people unfamiliar with my references just as Stephen loses me referencing scenes from movies I haven’t seen. It’s the compromise of using pop jargon to express classic problems just to get the most pop oriented out of the rat race long enough to think about more than the next hustle.

… all out of bubblegum

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass … and I'm all out of bubblegum!"

Just followed Crooks and Liars' video of the 100 cheeziest movie lines on their open thread to John Carpenter's They Live and was slammed in the face with a mirror. Made, ostensibly in reaction to Reganomics trickle-down economics amidst the disco era of '86, I think I missed it protecting one prejudice or another. This morning I watched it and realized that if I had seen it, this blog would be named the title of this post rather than more subtle cheezy line, "…it must be the vapors," from Vivien Leigh in Street Car Named Desire.

In typical, in your face moviemaking, Carpenter pierced the mythos of western civilization by creating an alien race of the shepherds of the sheeple against whom I attempt to refrain from railing quite so directly. With just those pair of glasses, our hero sees the subliminal messages behind the media in helvetica extra bold; obey, buy, work, like generic packaging, and the aliens appear to be skeletons. That may be why I didn't catch it the first time.

FEED THE WORLD, GET ALL THE PUSSY!

LADIES & GENTLEMEN, A TRUE HERO

Representative Alan Grayson

in the first bipartisan action of the year

Maddam Speaker I have words for both Democrats and Republicans tonight. Let's start with the Democrats. We as a party have spent the last six months-- the greatest minds of our party dwelling on the question, the unbelievably consuming question of how to get Olympia Snowe to vote for health care reform. I want to remind us all... Olympia Snowe was not elected president last year. Olympia Snowe has no veto power in the Senate. Olympia Snowe represents a state with one half of one percent of America's population.

What America wants is health care reform. America doesn't care if it gets fifty one votes in the Senate or sixty votes in the Senate, or eighty three votes in the Senate-- in fact America doesn't even care about that. It doesn't care about that at all.

What America cares about is this. There are over one million Americans who go broke every single year trying to pay their health care bill. America cares a lot about that. America cares about the fact that there are forty four thousand seven hundred eighty Americans who die every single year on account of not having health care. That's a hundred and twenty two every day. America sure cares a lot about that.

America cares about the fact that if you have a pre-existing condition even if you have health insurance, it's not covered. America cares about that a lot. America cares about the fact that you can get all the health care you need as long as you don't need any. America cares about that a lot.

But America does not care about procedures, processes, personalities-- America doesn't care about that at all. So we have to remember that as Democrats. We have to remember that's what's at stake here is life and death, enormous amounts of money and people are counting upon us to move ahead. America understands what's good for America.

America cares about health care. America cares about jobs. America cares about education, about energy independence. America does not care about process or politicians, or personalities or anything like that.

And I have a few words for my Republican friends as well. I guess I do have some Republican friends. Let me say this. Last week I held up this report here and I pointed out that in America there's forty four thousand seven hundred eighty nine Americans who die every year according to this Harvard report-- published in a peer reviewed journal-- because they have no health insurance.

That's an extra forty four thousand seven hundred eighty nine Americans who die, whose lives could be saved-- and their response was to ask me for an apology... to ask me for an apology. That's right... to ask me for an apology. Well, I'm telling you this-- I will not apologize. I will not apologize.

I will not apologize for a simple reason. America doesn't care about your feelings. I violated no rules by calling this report to America's attention. I think a lot of people didn't know about it before hand.

But America does care about health care in America and if you're against it, then get out of the way. Just get out of the way. You can lead. You can follow-- or you can get out of the way. And I'm telling you now to get out of the way.

America understands that there's one party in this country that's in favor of health care reform and one party that's against it and they know why.

They understand if Barack Obama were somehow able to cure hunger in the world, the Republicans would blame him for over-population.

They understand that if Barack obama could somehow bring about world peace, they'd blame him for destroying the defense industry*.

In fact they understand that if Barack Obama has a BLT sandwich tomorrow for lunch, they will try to ban bacon.

But that's what America wants. America wants solutions to its problems and that begins with health care. And that's what I'm speaking for tonight.

* Addendum: considering Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize this morning and Limbaugher/Bletch were out cheerleading the rednecks by noon, Grayson appears to be somewhat of a sage for all his convictions.

STRENGTH TO LET GO

When you find things are more enjoyable, not because of anything you’ve done to change them, but because you got over annoyance with the way it has and will always be, one may find a depth of fulfilling pleasure that seems out of reach from any other direction.

After the requisite quantity of lifetime and quality of experience I felt qualified to declare myself among the masters of the earth. I had graduated as a mechanical engineer and been snapped up by the premier technology leader in ‘64, IBM. I had learned to program computers based on the physical requirements of the mechanisms they were to control. Now I worked for the company that made the computers themselves; designed and manufactured the mechanisms that handled the keyboard inputs, the magnetic card/tape recording and printing the perfect text messages extruded from composers’ platens.

Oh, yeah. I had it all. A wife, two kids and an income in such excess of my needs that half went straight to stock that split every six-months. The American dreamer ensconced in the pillow growing softer every paycheck. Nothing could get to me.

Sixteen year-old Robin Graham pushed his 24 foot sloop, Dove, away from the dock in Southern California in’65. Like the proverbial butterfly effect, the breeze that filled his sails blew between the lines of whatever our marriage certificate meant to my wife until it became clear to us both it did not include our cashing in our stash for a boat capable of circumnavigation and a world class education for the girls. When I learned of Robin’s voyage through the syndication of his adventure in National Geographic a couple of years into his five year circumnavigation, that security blanket began to feel like a padded cell and my wife became the warden every time I’d suggest our escape. It’s scary out there.

I settled for the sop of a Cal20 bumping around in landlocked Lake Travis until the fateful day I smoked the straw that broke the camel’s back, and she pushed off to the safer harbor of mama’s wing leaving me to “listen to the grass grow.”

Well, here 38 years later, as it has and always will, the grass growing sounds much more pleasant than me mowing. I have a long way to go in learning to detect and relax wishes to control the course of the inevitables in nature. This is inextricably intertwined with detecting and shedding culturally inculcated “truths” by which I am still tethered to the shore of the myth of western civilization’s destiny to reshape the earth in order to see nature as it is.

I sewed my canvas sail and stretched it out in the breeze across tipi poles taking me as far afield from the American dream as any circumnavigation of a globe being slathered in it could ever take me. Curious as to what one would do for an encore after such an accomplishment by the age of twenty-one I looked Robin up and find that he attended Stanford studying architecture. After two years, both he and Patti, the girl he met in Australia, became disenchanted with a society based on youth swallowing civilization’s myth whole with no experience outside high school (reminds me of me, even after four years of military) and built a log cabin in a Montana forest to raise their daughter, Quimby. We sail the same sea, different tacks.

SELF STARTING HEROES

Democracy Now featured what I hope is the beginning of a long line of proactive volunteers making the vision of change a reality. Tim DeChristopher saw a chance to delay Bush's last minute auctioning off of 150,000 acres of scenic Utah parkland to the oil and gas industry by becoming a bidder and buying 22,000 acres for himself and driving up the price on the rest of the land before he was sussed and arrested. The entire auction was suspended when it was found he had no means or intention of paying, thereby delaying the fire sale favors Bush was returning to the petroleum industry which has been leading this country around by wallet until the Obama administration can cancell the whole deal.

"I knew that as bad as this could possibly turn out, if I ended up going to prison, then I could live with that. But if I saw an opportunity to protect the land of southern Utah and I saw an opportunity to keep some oil in the ground and give us a better chance for a livable future and I passed up that opportunity, then I wouldn’t be able to live with that. And so, I just had to make that choice on my own."

Tim DeCristopher

MENTOR OR MESSIAH?

I’m not sure where this post is headed but I know it must be said. At the same time euphoria was becoming the united state of the liberal minded population of this planet last Tuesday night, a sense of déjà vu began gnawing at the edges of my elation as I gazed through misty eyes at ecstatic crowds realizing a dream of a lifetime. All day yesterday, while puttering in the garden or whittling a length of bamboo, I kept hearing indistinguishable traces of a song from the seventies but nothing more. A while ago I was feeding the chickens and their excitement and ravenous anticipation of and quarreling over the choice parts made the final line to the song come bursting into my lungs as I let go with, “Save yourselves!!!”

After putting up the eggs I came in and began searching YouTube for the exact song from Jesus Christ Superstar where the hero turns to the impatiently imploring throng requesting special favors and delivers that greatest of statements I have ever heard attributed to his wisdom — save yourselves.

Barack Obama is on the eve of quite possibly the greatest change for the betterment of mankind in its entire history if we heed his admonition that his ascendance to the seat of power and the inspiration for change it is for so many is not the change itself. The change must be the better person we let ourselves be by just realizing that it is contributing to the idea of a better world he encourages us to create for ourselves and consequentially, for everyone.

While searching for that particular song I came across others that seemed applicable to President Obama’s situation. In Mary Magdalene’s song I Don’t Know How To Love Him she speaks of having so many men before because she never expected her dreams to come true. Now we will see how well everyone who has dreamt of this time is prepared to act from their better self rather than as they had been in a world whose government didn’t trust them.

The difference here is whether Barack Obama is seen as a messiah or a mentor; whether we sit back and wait for miracles from some mythical creator dude or whether he represents an example of wise competence to which we all may freely aspire. I remember a rant I sent to the local rag during a city-wide argument over public transportation in which I made the same point: merely voting for better service and not voting every day with your ass on the bus doesn’t get your car out of the traffic that is much more the problem than better buses. The fervor that elected Barack Obama president must now get on the bus and remain as committed as a matter of life style — or we will be mything the point again.

A TALE OF TWO BOYS

Aye hated the people his leaders told him had killed thousands of his people and turned his will over to men vowed to take revenge. So did Bea.

Aye was trained to load explosives on his vehicle and explode them in the middle of the targets his leaders assigned him. So did Bea.

Bea’s target was a café in his hometown where Aye’s people were said to be. His vehicle was his body. He died being torn into more pieces than the others who died that day. Such was his passion for avenging the death of his entire family the day before.

Aye’s target was the general area where Bea’s people were said to be. His vehicle was a tank. He watched entire blocks explode from the isolation of his armor and lived to see those people and more dying for the rest of his life. Such was his passion for avenging the death of his friends in ambush the day before,

Which came first, the terrorist, or the terrorist?

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NATURAL TREASON

This post is a two headed snake or two snakes I can’t tell apart. I realize that my posts don’t wander very far from the theme of returning to symbiosis with nature as a cure for our history of antagonism toward it and to thereby, hopefully mediate the impending karmic comeuppance on the social, economic, political and environmental scenes. This time I had two posts working simultaneously when I realized that the derogatory reputation of the peasant in modern life was wrought by the same evolution that made our tools our masters and we their slavish morons. I will leave them as separate posts for the perspective I gained when I realized that the government has become so corporatized that mere thrift is anti-American and barter is downright treasonous. You don’t have to march in protest to be a terrorist anymore, merely living without paying the price that is being protested is enough.

BLOGS THAT EXCELL

I have observed a range of responses to memes and awards go from giddy outbursts of the closet exhibitionist in every blogger through total indifference to ivory tower animosity towards cretins daring to touch the hem of genius.

Awards seem to generate from the feeling anyone gets upon observing something extraordinary making one turn to see if anyone shared it or might. In my relatively small blogroll, I have such wishes to share tid bytes and whole stories with which my reading is littered and am often tempted to start one of those many blogs that are a sort of ongoing award show with a daily collection of links to such awardable posts. About one out of ten of my posts give shout outs to individuals or posts whose thinking or action inspires my own. The family of folks I tune into daily have extensive enough blogrolls that I need not have one of my own except as my own speed dial but I continue to add them to aid their exposure if not my daily visits.

Two of this daily family have hit me with the Excellent Blog Award which, while being the kind of flattery that will get them anywhere, seems to dilute itself by coming with the stipulation that each awardee then award ten more. Burbanmom listed her 18link speed dial, “All of the blogs I have listed under 'Family, Friends and Blogs I Like'”. Minx included me in her decade as, “so here are my list of 10 victims who are less lazy than me -,” and went on to list nine other boggers far beyond my skills or talent. As blogosphere inbreeding would have it, both Minx and Burbanmom got awarded by another on my blogroll, Leslie. And so it goes.

And me, what about my ten? I am still holding off on awarding the the last of five Thinking Blogger Awards which befell my duty way back in ‘06 sometime. With one tenth of the concentration the word excellent requires to be used for any one of these folks I give you my list of excellent blogs not already awarded such as far as I know.

The Far Queue — Pisces Iscatiot’s words have no meaning until he puts them together. Consistently, though too rarely of late, the most thought provoking writer in my sphere of discovery.

The Time Being — Steve Kilby’s daily stream of creative thinking is the kind of honest self examination and meditation on love and life that allows his originality to shine through all the derivative artifacts with which we all must express our thoughts.

Karoline in the Morning — Read her gentle words, feel her sense of life invade your defenseless places and soon there is nowhere to defend, and you are filled with Karoline.

Unremitting Failure — Mike’s drollery is the most constant joy in my blogging experience. He’s got some poignant zingers in amongst his dry humor, so wait ‘til it’s over before you guffaw too loudly, it may be about you.

Empress of Dirt — Melissa has a garden blog like I will have if I ever learn to grow enough food to sustain myself year round. Her love of growing things and creating garden art and showing photos of what she loves to see in Ontario is inspiring to say the least.

Driftglass — The only one writer blog amongst my political animals category, Driftglass seems to find the same horrors being perpetrated by our government that I do and expresses them with far more vitriolic insight born of closer experience in the arena I only catch putrid whiffs of.

Well that’s six out of ten, as far as I got with my first attempt with the thinking blogger award.

°•°
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Memes, a tag game within the blindman’s bluff of the internet, seem to be generated by a genuine wish to know more about perceived secrets held by intriguing bloggers. It’s a whole new world, this making fast friends based on no more than our perception of the mind and intent authoring pixelated words expressing observations, interests, ideas and preferences without a voice to measure passion or a face to pigeonhole with physical prejudices. One would think it would be a purely mental activity. Without natural direct experience of one another we are only information along with the lying agendas and the possibly photoshopped pictures that create our world view on the news. We have, in this modern age of instant worldwide communication brought mankind full circle to where the level of individual success within society no longer depends on the believability of authority or reported facts at hand but the on the ability of the perceiver of the chaos of information to find the theme relevant to specific concerns. No more laws, walls or weapons for an established truth to work from — we are face to face with creations too vast to be believed, much less understood, in which only our grounding in the natural curve can find meaning. The government is no longer a guarantee of nourishment in the shopping aisle, we must revert to hunting and gathering the berries of truth growing in the jungle of information. Memes serve as taste samples of particularly interesting berries.

Whoa, sorry about that little side track into the liberating effect of the internet. Burbanmom also tagged me with the six unimportant things meme??? which comes with the following rules:

(1) Link to the person that tagged you.
(2) Post the rules on your blog.
(3) Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
(4) Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
(5) Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

Here goes a delve into the unimportant habits and quarks here in the vapors —

1) I cannot put my palms down flat due to a symmetrical gradual shriveling of my pinkies over the past twenty years.

2) Because of one, above, I am often mistaken for a mason when shaking hands.

3) Because of one, above, I have a callous on my right pinky from pressure on the mouse that is as large as the callous I developed on my bird finger from using pencils, pens and paint brushes all my life.

4) Before either pinkie began to draw up like a chicken foot there appeared an minute indentation in each palm as if a stitch had been taken from within my hand.

5) The indentations in my palms are the anchor points for the rigid, shrinking tendon that is pulling my pinkies into fists of their own.

6) I am very careful about not falling on my face or slapping anyone or thing because it really hurts to try and straighten out my pinkies even slowly.

C’mon, you guys. The meme called for unimportant. There exists no limit to the unimportance of the infinitude of my quirks, I feel like the savant that can reel off the first few thousand decimal places of pi.

Realizing that everyone is not so gifted, I will embarrass no one by passing this meme on. Because the six are to be chosen at random, choose yourself if you so choose. Happy meming.

OHHHH, THE TIDE IS TURNING

I am not sure what turned the tide, but at the last minute, the United States agreed to join the consensus of emission reduction of 20-40% by 2020 at the Bali Environmental Summit. Still not enough but a step in the right direction. Attendees credit the delegate from Papua, New Guinea's saying to the US, "If you are not going to lead, get out of our way." It is the best environmental news since the Cayahooga River burned itself out.

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For one of the best uses of metaphor I've come across in a long while in a very modern fairy tale check out Parlor Radicals by Adam Engel over at Tomas Paine's Journal.

MY AYN RAND

A few posts ago I began with the metaphor of choosing appropriate stones to match the look of the wall one is building as an example of cherry picking life experiences and literary inspirations out of a plethora of influences. I got a bit side tracked by the beauty of Andy Goldsworthy’s wall and South America’s rejection of the IMF, but I just got reminded of my original inspiration for beginning that metaphor by reading yet another socialist rant against followers of Ayn Rand’s philosophy over at Driftglass.

The chaos of nature insures a variety in individuals that genetic memory is powerless to prevent with its subliminal guidance. The sequence of life experiences is the new thread being woven into the growing tapestry of conscious memories by ones vision of the world and place in it. I find no example more apt than the bible of any religion to show such universal variety of interpretation, except in the area where threats of retribution for nonconformity influences those given to belief. I didn’t chose bibles for their religious aspects, but for their saturated dissemination within the culture from which they arose. From ultra orthodoxy to vehement heresy accounts only for the spectrum dealing with the idea that the books must be believed over all contradictions by ones own experience.

If I may (if I can), I’d like to leave the religious, belief, faith, trust aspects out of the rest of the discussion and get to life as an endless experiment based on the state of ones experiment at any given time. I have mentioned how I can glean pearls of wisdom from fiction and non fiction without a concern for which. Although the source deserves my gratitude for the expression that inspired me, likely as not, what I got isn’t exactly what the author meant. As Japanese golfers have shown me, everyone puts a signature twist to their lives as well as to their picture perfect strokes. And the proliferation of variety in ideas continues as inevitably and as coincidentally as the rest of nature.

When I turned on to Ayn Rand I had just left four years of the Marines and was a freshman mechanical engineer at Mississippi State University and was so inspired by Howard Roark’s courtroom defense of the rights of the creative individual in Fountainhead that it became the pet theory against which all other ideas had to compete in the formulation of a proto-yuppie philosophy that was to stand me in good stead through my first five or six years of realizing the ideal of that theory as an engineer at IBM. Silly me, I had interpreted her opposition to the collectivists to be a description of ruthless capitalists who profit from efforts not their own always out to buy up creations that would put them out of business. When the product I helped design passed all the performance tests and was formally announced, rather than being assigned a new product to bring into reality the next step for the team was to redesign the product to break down as soon after warranty as physically possible to achieve the ultimate bottom line, because a penny saved on five million machines is fifty thousand dollars.

Disgust with the ethics and the assignment combined to cause me to seriously reexamine how I had become part of an elite collective living in an IBM ghetto, confining all social interaction to the company compound and the company of company cronies in ventures to the local bowling alley, links and bars. Only the dichotomy seemed to be that that life was also John Galt’s solution to separating himself from the collective in Atlas Shrugged: secretly form alliances with other creative individuals to establish a community separate from the clueless, needy rabble of the collective!! WTF! You must understand, I had never even had a conversation with a "socialist" to this point in my life and really only knew about communism through American propaganda. Such are the fruits of US American, white, male privilege I have since learned. The blinders of certainty about the unknown.

After my family life moved away, my last justification for making more money than I knew what to do with departed as well. The part of Ayn Rand’s philosophy concerning the idea that the individual must become of use to, responsible for and an honor to ones own self before any action can fully realize the meaning of treating others as one would be treated is still the pertest of pet theories, though I have become bereft of my confusion about which collective collects the money and which collectives want the money and which collectives want never to see money again and how many tribes there are amongst communities who don’t even think about collectives or tribes or money. We ARE in it together, no matter what our attitude toward that little truism is or how little or much we discuss it.

I moved to a communal house, an honest to goddess, grass roots, cooperative collection of kindred souls lasting until gentrification scattered we roaches to our individual parts of the larger tribes of artisans, musicians, writers, surveyors, carpenters, dancers, and gardeners whose contributions to the gestalt are always gifts because none are so needy as to expect or demand them. The levitation trick with five friends comes to mind. Still, that remained my only experience of socialism until I began blogging.

It was like sticking my finger in a light socket. Within my first ten posts I received an invite to be a contributor to the Further Left Forum for reasons I have yet to understand, they sure didn’t want my light in their den of America haters. But the short while I was there I ran into blog friends with which my slant does not clash destructively, while we all hone our ability to express our outrage at the present state of world affairs in ways to better jostle, cajole, persuade, alert the sleepers to the dream, the collective myth of representative government from which we are awakening.

So when I hear otherwise reasonable socialists go off on Ayn for the conscienceless excesses of the collective elite, neocon, fascist, capitalistic illuminati I feel the urge to write this post.

And now I have, and I feel a lot better. Obviously, from where I show up in the political compass map below, her left/right politics didn’t influence me at all, while her championing of the responsible individual, especially in her shortest work, Anthem, definitely influenced my tendency toward anarchy.

Okay, folks, have at her once again.

LOVE IS ITS OWN REWARD

"Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius."
Sir Edward Gibbon

You heard the man you love

You heard the man you love
talking to himself in the next room.
He didn't know you were listening.
You put your ear against the wall
but you couldn't catch the words,
only a kind of rumbling.
Was he angry? Was he swearing?
Or was it some kind of commentary
like a long obscure footnote on a page of poetry?
Or was he trying to find something he'd lost,
such as the car keys?
Then suddenly he began to sing.
You were startled
because this was a new thing,
but you didn't open the door, you didn't go in,
and he kept on singing, in his deep voice, off-key,
a purple-green monotone, dense and heathery.
He wasn't singing for you, or about you.
He had some other source of joy,
nothing to do with you at all—
he was an unknown man, singing in his own room, alone.
Why did you feel so hurt then, and so curious,
and also happy,
and also set free?

——Margaret Atwood

I was compelled to post this poem for its rarity in delicately capturing the essence of what keeps love alive, beings sufficient unto themselves able to love each other for having the same such admirable capacities the day they met and allowing them all the room they need miles on down the road.

Consider love. Presupposing free will in others is the requisite for falling in love. It is the existence of a discriminating awareness on the other end that is the source of any possible thrill, attraction, and respect.
——Daniel Rirdan, Ecovillage proposer (1966 - )

THE HERETIC AND THE WIZ

He saw the truth just as it is
No words to claim it as his
He watches others claiming
To know just by naming
Those things given names
By the Wiz.

The Wiz takes many a form
Authority’s the only norm
Gospel is the song it sings
Righteousness the curse it brings
To those being cursed
By the storm.

The Wiz is parents, churches, schools and states
Science feeding at corporate plates
They form the bossy body politic
Giving rise to our heroic heretic
Light to shine for lives in the dark
On their fates.

His message clad in metaphor
To distance the sacred from the gore
Watching chickens’ pecking order;
Wolves peeing on their border
Not like our wars and walls and waste
Of life galore.

Every body is made of cells
In the center of each there dwells
Intelligence giving local reports
Coloring pictures to which the body resorts
Prejudice makes the unknown unable
To ring any bells.

Curiosity limited to exploitation
Imagination given shoddy information
As the tautology perpetuates
Unwillingness to clear the gates

To where thinking thrives on fresh ideas

After Wiz regurgitation.

FROM DAEMONS TO DEAMONS

I don’t remember reading many books and gaining my own vision of the story before seeing the movie; There was Battle Cry, based on Leon Uris’ first book and my incentive for joining the Marines before finishing high school. There was Payton Place, Life According to Garp, To Kill a Mockingbird and of course the classics we read in school. I never read Lord of the Rings. But in general, my reading is pretty much off the best seller map, following traces in the spaces of a flexible curriculum so attractive to my irrepressible curiosity. Among such ponder wanders I fell into the imaginary world of Philip Pullman following the opening page of The Golden Compass when the little hero, Lyra Belaqua, her daemon, Pantalaimon and I set out upon an adventure in a world where humans can speak with the rest of the animals. I read the entire enthrallogy plagued with that sappy hope that the world could be that way some day. What can I say, I’m a sap.

I have begun rereading the trilogy in preparation for seeing the movie version due out in December — I hope they don’t make it Xmasy. I wonder if the reread is to bolster my memory of my version against any omissions or contradictions? Can I let my version go sufficiently enough to immerse myself in the movie’s version? So far these considerations loom with the flies on the wall of my mental asylum as I literally revisit a beloved land before developers move in to make of it what they will — or leave it in its virgin state. Riiiiight. Previews are promising.

Speaking of saps, I would like to say something in defense of the etymology of the word fool and of often gladly being one when the time is ripe. Originally a fool was defined as one capable of being fond and found favor as compassionately wise council to authorities. The negative campaign against this definition was waged by the blood thirsty righteousness of traders, raiders and crusaders against conscientious objectors refusing to rape, pillage and murder. Today, our leader has no compassionate wisdom at his side, no daemon — all that is on the other side against his war, the seventy percent who see the simple fact that we cannot achieve peace or make friends with the people who’ve survived our killing of their loved ones every day for four years. The thirty percent who stick with this madhouse regime, are hoping to share in the loot, or at least get eaten last. Congress critters cry that to call for a compassionate end to the killing bodes termination of their precious careers and every one of ‘em say they’re nobody’s fool.

CHECK IT OUT

THIS
is what it's all about.

Thank you Mr. Damon

MY GENERATION -by the WHO's too old?

Oh Yeeeeaaaah.